


Requiem for a Fallen Star

by deslea



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - Thorne & Rowling
Genre: Cursed Child, F/M, Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-08
Updated: 2016-08-08
Packaged: 2018-08-07 10:58:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7712308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deslea/pseuds/deslea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They are the last two, the ones left to watch the lights go out over what could have been.</p><p>  <em>Trigger warning for (non-graphic, well-into-adulthood, non-groomed) pseudo-incest. It's complicated.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Requiem for a Fallen Star

_The stars are not wanted now: put out every one // Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun_ \-- W. H. Auden, _Stop all the clocks_

 

It has always been his destiny to wait and watch.

Watch what? Many things, but mostly the inevitable extinction of greatness. The greatest stars are the fastest to die. He has seen it in the heavens, and he has seen it in his world. The Dark Lord. Bellatrix. His kind, his way of life. And now, Delphi.

He is not great, so it has not been his destiny to die. His destiny is to be the faithful witness, the shepherd, the priest. To be the one who walks alongside, and to die alone when every other death is done.

It is his duty, and he will carry it out to the end, but oh, how tired he is of officiating the death of what he loves.

And he does love Delphi. He loves her because she is his duty, and duty, for him, is love. He loves her because she is so very much like his lost love and his lost lord. He loves her because she was left behind, too.

But more than anything, he loves her because she is a great and dying star, and she is the final, gasping light of a world that is lost to them both.

* * *

 

"Azkaban-B is a closed prison, Mr Lestrange."

"I'm aware of that, Warden," Rodolphus said evenly. "I was, if you recall, an inmate there myself."

"So you were. And you know better than most why it is closed."

"To avoid the spread of Death Eater ideology to the general prison population, and the world at large," Rodolphus quoted from the _Azkaban-B Prison Manual._ He knew it by heart.

"Correct. When the last of you dies, it will be demolished, and the remains will be ground to dust and scattered. There will be no shrine here."

No doubt the warden intended this to hurt, but it didn't. His ancestral home had already been acquired and obliterated from the earth, and every other place he had loved would follow soon enough. Azkaban-B was not one of them.

"Nonetheless, no inmate has been denied visits from immediate family. It is against every policy the Ministry has signed since the war."

"Mr Lestrange, she may bear your name, but you are not her father. That was established by the courts during her trial."

"I was married to her mother. I am her presumptive and legal father. I maintained her financially. She is registered as mine." He didn't know whether this last was true; Bellatrix and the Dark Lord had debated the point for some time, weighing the benefits of obscurity for Delphi during the war versus unquestioned paternity after the war was won. He had signed the papers, but never knew for sure whether Bella had lodged them.

The Warden sighed heavily. "Look, Lestrange, I'm not opposed. I have stepkids myself. And anyway, she's crazy as a loon with or without you, and she isn't going anywhere. But you're a Death Eater, seeking to visit someone who tried to bring the Dark Lord back to life." He softened. "I'm not saying no. I'm saying my arse needs to be covered, so help me out here. Give me a reason that I can take up the chain."

"Prison has changed," Rodolphus said. "You know it as well as I. And if she commits suicide in here…if it comes out that you denied her access to the only person who would see her, the only father she ever knew…" The Warden scowled. "Besides. Who is easier to control? The one with privileges that can be removed? Or the one with nothing to lose?"

The Warden eyed him shrewdly. "Do you mean her, Lestrange? Or do you mean you?"

Rodolphus' eyes narrowed. "Maybe I mean both."

* * *

 

"I swore I would never come back to this place." 

Rodolphus said this as he dropped down on the floor at her side.

"Why did you, then?" Delphi demanded. Her eyes were darting and suspicious. He was uncomfortably reminded of Bella at her maddest.

"Because you need a father, and I'm the only one you have left," he said simply. "And because I have to give you what you need, if it's mine to give."

"What is that, some promise you made my mother?" she demanded.

"It is your birthright," he said. "You might as well ask why the sky is blue." _You might as well ask why I loved your mother._

She looked up sharply at that, and he had the uncomfortable sense that she knew what he was thinking, or guessed.

"My mother wasn't yours," she snapped. "You can't change that now."

He stared at her. "She wasn't _anyone's_. Not even your father's, not really. She was…she was a force of _nature._ Like you."

Delphi stared at him. Eyes wide. 

"You don't hold a star," he said. "You just…watch. And they were both stars, twin stars, falling together."

"And you watched them fall."

" _No,_ " he flared. "I watched them _shine._ "

* * *

 

"I failed you."

It was years before Delphi truly accepted him as…well, as anything at all. The day she said this was the day he knew it had happened. He'd suspected it earlier, but never been sure, not really. 

"You didn't fail me, Delphi," he said easily. They were sitting companionably together on her little cell cot.

"I did. I could have stopped our world from passing away." She was looking away from him, out the barred window. Grey clouds hovered; Rodolphus could almost see the Dementors of old in them.

"No, you couldn't have. Civilisations rise, and then they fall away and are replaced by others. It's the way of the world. It can be slowed. It can't be stopped."

She turned to stare at him. "Why on earth not?"

He shrugged. "Because once you're at the top, you forget what it's like to be anywhere else. You forget how to be _hungry_ for it. But the ones below never stop being hungry. Last century, the hungry ones were the Muggle-lovers. Next century it will be someone else." He said thoughtfully, "Our world was a beautiful thing, but it no longer matters to anyone but us. So, let it pass with us. They don't deserve it anyway. They haven't earned it. They haven't _bled_ for it."

Delphi's brow puckered. "But then why did you send me back to change it?"

"I hoped there was time," Rodolphus said simply. "Maybe your lifetime and mine. I thought maybe, if there was…"

She said quietly, "You thought we wouldn't have to watch the fall."

He nodded.

"Is that why you keep coming to see me?" she wondered.

"Partly," he admitted. "And partly because my freedom is yours in the first place. I got fifteen years instead of life because I was watching over you during the final battle." He added with a sideways twitch of his mouth, "The tribunal assumed I'd defected."

"So you owe me your freedom, and you're using it to watch over me again," she said thoughtfully. There was satisfaction in her tone; reciprocation and transaction were vocabulary she understood. She spoke them better than loyalty and love. She was like her father that way.

"Yes," he agreed.

"All right, then," she said thoughtfully, and sneaked further into the crook of his arm.

* * *

 

"I don't need a father anymore. I need a lover."

Delphi said this in 2034, when she was thirty-seven and Rodolphus was seventy-nine. He was barely middle-aged, in wizarding terms, but he felt much older. Everyone he knew had died in battle, or withered and self-destructed since. Everyone but her.

There was nothing she could say that could shock him. Nothing but that.

"I can't do that," he said, aghast. "Anything else. Not that."

"Why not?" she wondered. Patiently, as though she had expected this, but didn't really understand it.

"It would be…a betrayal," he said, after a pause. "I may not be your blood, but I'm the only father you've ever known."

"Even so. Incest is common among our kind, is it not?"

"Across the generations, not down them. The role of a father is to raise a child, and then release her to build a family of her own. To choose a partner freely from everyone else in the world. It is a betrayal for him to take the role of partner himself. He must exclude himself so she can grow up and away."

Anger flared in her eyes. "And who can I choose, other than you, Rodolphus? How can I grow up and away from you? Surely you see that does not apply here?"

He did. Merlin help him, he did.

"You said you would be whatever I needed," she said implacably. "This is what I need."

He thought it was so very _Delphi_ to demand this of him, no matter the cost to him, just because she knew he had to give. In this, she was more like her parents than she knew. 

"You're asking me to damn myself," he said after a long, long moment.

"Yes," she said calmly. "I am."

He didn't think he could do it, but there was Bella enough in her that he could. As long as it was dark.

* * *

 

In 2051, Alecto Carrow died, leaving Delphi with the dubious distinction of becoming the sole occupant of Azkaban-B.

The prison had loosened its restrictions as its occupants had aged. Their days became gradually less regimented. A vacant space had been converted into gardens they could tend during set hours. The cells remained austere, but increasingly, the prisoners were allowed into common rooms that were almost pleasant. 

These concessions were entirely lost on the prison's elderly and senile occupants. Most were Rodolphus' age, and he wasn't young, but they had aged far more than he. There were no Dementors anymore, but many of them, it seemed, were doing a perfectly good job of losing their minds all on their own.

Privately, he thought what they suffered from most was grief - the same grief as he, grief for a way of life that was no more. But while he had purpose, and endured, they had none, and withered.

The restrictions on visits had eased, too, and now, Rodolphus spent most of his time there. Not as her lover - that had petered out a decade ago, and as far as he knew, the prison had never known of it. (At least, he hoped they hadn't; that was his true Unforgivable, the one thing he wanted to take to the grave). But she was as much his companion now as he was hers.

After Alecto died, virtually all rules became negotiable, as long as Delphi didn't leave, and before long, Rodolphus lived there. Ostensibly in one of the old guard's quarters. In fact, he rarely left Delphi's side.

It wasn't so much for Delphi, now. She was never the most stable of people, but age had settled her, to an extent. But he was an old, old man, and outside he had nothing. He was an unwanted relic of a distasteful era now past.

He would rather be in Azkaban than in the world, now, and it appeared that for the world's part, the feeling was heartily returned.

* * *

 

"You're dying."

She said it one day in the twilight of his life.

"I am," he said. There was no question of lying to her. "How did you know?"

"I'm the Augurey," she said with a twinkle. She'd softened with age, just a little. "Also, your skin is yellowed."

"Indeed." She was right; his liver was on the way out. Ridiculous that it should be the first part of him to go; the Dark Lord had liked his soldiers austere, and he'd rarely drank. 

Maybe he should have drunk a bit more. 

"You'll need to kill me before it happens," she said, still in that mildly conversational tone. "You can't leave me here alone."

He swallowed. Looked away, out the window. "I know."

He'd looked for someone to watch over her, and failed. He'd appealed to all their distant kin - the Malfoys, the Lupins, the Potters, the Weasleys. The Ministry, too. Fifty years had passed since her crimes, but their hearts hadn't softened towards her. He hadn't expected them to, and didn't blame them, but he'd had to try.

It had begun with the two of them, alone together in a cell, and it would end that way as well.

"You won't let me down," she said.

"No," he agreed. "I won't."

* * *

 

It has always been his destiny to wait and watch.

After this, last vigil, though, his work will be over. She is the last light of their kind. Last rites for the last light, requiem for a fallen star.

He feels terrible, terrible loneliness.

He has never wished he was great, before. He was always content to be the consort, the helper, the follower in the shadows. But oh, if only he had been great. If only he could have gone down like Bella, in glory, thinking even then that the world would still be won. If only he had not been left to tend these dying embers of their world. And Delphi - his poor, feral, doomed Delphi. Daughter and lover and unwilling partner in this deathwatch for a way of life.

"Do you think we miss it?" she wonders, looking up at the moon. She is toying with a dark, blood-red rose. "What we leave behind? Do you think some feeling of it lingers?"

"Merlin, I hope not," he says. He has missed it quite enough for far too many decades already. Better that it all crumbles and passes away. It doesn't matter anymore, not to anyone but them. They will both be dust soon enough, and the walls around them, too.

"I don't need a lover anymore," she says presently, though it is decades since he's touched her that way. "I need a father."

He feels it, then. Tears rising in his throat. He'd really thought he'd shed every last one of them already. He's too damned old and empty for this. 

He can't speak. Just holds out his arm for her. She comes over to the little garden bench where he sits, and nestles into the crook of his arm.

"Tell me a story," she says after a while, looking up at him, glassy-eyed. It's the death potion, but it reminds him of when she was a baby, fighting sleep while they waited for Bella to come home.

"Once upon a time," he says, stroking back faded blue and silver hair, "there was a great witch."

Strong, beautiful, wilful Bella. He'd loved her. Oh, how he'd loved her. She was the brightest star, the one who started it all. Seventy years gone, now, and he still sees her corona sometimes in the still of the night, an echo from light years away.

_It has always been his destiny to watch and wait._

"And the witch had a husband to help her and a lord to love her. They had a daughter, and all they ever wanted was to give her the world."

That's all he remembers, and all he needs to. Her eyes are closed. She's not dead, not yet, but really, she's already gone. 

Some stars die like this, he thinks. They quietly collapse under their own weight, fall in on themselves. Drawing everything in their orbit into annihilation right along with them.

It was never his destiny to change it, though, not any of it. It was only to outlast it and bear witness that it had happened.

He thinks this as he drinks gratefully from his vial, twin to hers. She is still curled up against him, still breathing slow, shallow breaths. She will be dead within the hour; he, just a little longer. He will outlive her - it is his duty - but he will not feel her grow cold. Their warmth will simply…drift off into the night together.

The stars are dead, the world is gone, and what is left is no longer his concern.

His waiting is done.

END

**Author's Note:**

> Azkaban-B is based loosely on Spandau Prison, which housed the most notorious Nazi war criminals, and was destroyed in the same way after its last occupant died.


End file.
